Monthly Archives: July 2011

Node.js is the future of web dev happening now

Having been a javascript fan since I started working with it a long time ago, I immediately fell in love with Node.js. Having discarded Jaxer earlier as too proprietary, even though it offered a solid mechanism for code reuse on the client, I have now adopted the uber active Node community.

You see, me and my partner decided to build a new and exciting community site/app (of which I have to keep the details secret for now). So when I started designing our new web 3.0 app with accompanying mobile app, I thought about and thoroughly  investigated the possible frameworks out there. We decide to build a single page application that would work in all javascript clients, and would gracefully degrade to server roundtrips when javascript was not available (but also to enable deep linking for SEO). I quickly decided to discard most PHP frameworks for our MVC setup. Not only because of the fact that those were mostly too bloated or complex, but also because it implied having to recode a lot of functionality for the client. Of course I also favor the stateful and event driven possibilities of javascript, so I made the paradigm shift and chose the Node javascript stack.

With all the Node modules out there it is finally possible to create a full MVC framework operating on the server as well as in the client, in the form of backbone.js with the help of bones (a Node backbone server implementation offering code reuse in the client).
And with the help of HTML5’s new pushState, we don’t have to worry about breaking Google’s need for deep linking. (Those looking for an example with gracefully degrading URL’s, take a look at the jquery address plugin.)
More goodies come in the form of the browserify module, enabling us to optimally pack all our resources for client side usage, even all our templates and other static files!

Some more info for those interested:

With regards to storage, we decided to go for Cassandra, since we expect a lot of writes, and a lot of scaling. In the mean time I am hoping somebody will come up with a nice abstraction on top of the new Cassandra CQL language, since there are already some Node modules out there working with it.

Taking sessions into account, I am currently favouring Redis, which also has a nice pubsub layer. But I haven’t investigated that path fully yet.

In the mean time I am working on an iphone demo in Appcelerator’s Titanium. Too bad it doesn’t support all the functionality we need on Android as well.

That’s all for now. I have to try and curb my enthusiasm, as all this goodness may come at the expense of my sanity due to sleep deprivation.

My love for Paypal just died a little.

After having put some days of work into creating my friends book site (iktami.com), I decided to keep it simple and implement Paypal’s “Add to cart” buttons.
Wrong choice.

You see, I was under the impression that Paypal’s shopping cart would be able to handle shipping cost based on weight. But no, it isn’t. Well, only if you’re a merchant residing in the US.

What? I thought computers and the internet would help bring an end to discrimination and suffering.

What could be the reason for this? I am sure it’s not a technical problem, because that little and simple piece of code is agnostic of location. And it isn’t money, because they would probably make even more if they didn’t piss off merchants outside the US.
Maybe they just don’t care anymore, having all that money, and getting (re)tired of it all.
Or, could it be some political hidden agenda? These things pop up everywhere these days.
I am probably missing something here.